Monday, August 22, 2011

Eroma a composite of EROtic ROMAnce, is phrased as a virtual reality game in which the players' avatars participate. It is a sexual game; not only can avatars have sex, they are required to, to advance their positions. Every point is scored sexually. The players are connected so that when their avatars have sex, the players themselves experience thirty second orgasms, male and female, simultaneously. It is hard-wired, so to speak: when the male penetrates to operative depth, his member flips the buried switch that evokes an immediate climax for both parties. Naturally all male avatars are handsome and all female avatars are beautiful, and they throw themselves into the competition with a will. There are several settings; in each one, half the players are eliminated, until it is down to two, one man and one woman, and then at last a single winner.

We follow one man, Pedro, and one woman, Fotina, as they compete but befriend each other as avatars, and in the course of the game come to love each other. That love becomes personal as they meet outside the game and discover the limitations of sex where mutual orgasms are not programmed and details can be messy. No wonder many players prefer game sex. Then they are the finalists, when only one can win, complicated by their real emotions as contrasted to their game setting roles.

The settings range from a pleasant forested landscape where they must have sex to score points, to a dangerous alien planet where trees feed on players by sexually luring them into traps. In the first setting they must find private places for sex, or it can't happen; but most are already occupied by other couples. So players must be clever not only in their choice of partners, but in their choice of locale. Half are not clever enough. Those eliminated in one round may return in later rounds as obstacles: the surviving players must have sex with them, or avoid sex with them, depending on the situation, but they do not cooperate. It's quite a challenge.

Friday, August 12, 2011

Songs constantly run through my head. Some are popular ones I hear on the radio; many are folk songs I know from way back. Some are just incidental ones from anywhere. Each has its spot emotional history. For example “Cool Water” wherein two men trek through the desert, burning with thirst, dreaming of an oasis with plenty of water. “All day we faced the barren waste without the taste of water—cool, clear, water.” It's a lovely song. My mother wasn't much for the radio, but one day she turned it on, and they played that song. “I just somehow knew they'd play that one,” she said. When I mentioned it to a schoolmate, he said his favorite was the one on the other side of the record (in those days all we had was 78 RPM records that played about three minutes on a side), “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.” That one's lovely too, about drifting along with the tumbling weeds, cares fading away. Westerns are not my favorite, but these are wonderful melodic songs. Another is “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” wherein an erring cowboy sees the riders in the sky, their horses' feet flashing fire, and one paused to warn him that if he doesn't change his ways he will wind up riding with them forever. What a message! But there are peripheral; other tunes dominate my skull. More on those another day.